[IPython-dev] [ANN] IPython 0.10.1 is out.

[Fernando Perez]

Hi all,

Illustrating the need to *always* remember we credit in the commit
message the name of the person who made a contribution originally...

2010/10/12 Fernando Perez <fperez.net at gmail.com>:
> Hi all,
> - New IPython Sphinx directive.  You can use this directive to mark blocks in
>  reSructuredText documents as containig IPython syntax (including figures) and
>  the will be executed during the build::
[...]
> The following people contributed to this release (please let us know if we
> omitted your name and we'll gladly fix this in the notes for the future):

...
I completely failed to note that this feature (one out of the only two
new features in 0.10.2!) was contributed by John Hunter.

John shall be generously compensated for this offense with fresh
coffee and tropical fruit candy from Colombia, so there's nothing to
worry :)

But this is a good lesson for the committers.  I wrote the release
notes last night by scanning the full changelog and running this
function:

function gauthor() {
    git log "$@" | grep '^Author' | cut -d' ' -f 2- | sort | uniq
}

Since when John sent this, I failed to record his name in the
changelog, last night I simply forgot.  It's very, very hard to
remember months after the fact where any one piece of code came from,
so let's try to be disciplined about *always*:

- if the contribution is more or less ready-to-commit as sent, and the
committer only does absolutely minimal work, use

git commit --author="Original Author <original at author.com>"

- If the committer does significant amounts of rework, note the
original author in the long part of the commit message (after the
first summary line).  This will make it possible to find that
information later when writing the release notes.

Here are some examples from our log where I didn't screw up:

- Using --author:
commit 8323fa343e74a01394e85f3874249b955131976a
Author: Sebastian Busch <>
Date:   Sun Apr 25 10:57:39 2010 -0700

    Improvements to Vim support for visual mode.

    Patch by Sebastian Busch.

    Note: this patch was originally for the 0.10 series, I (fperez) minimally
    fixed it for 0.11 but it may still require some tweaking to work well with
    the refactored codebase.

    Closes https://bugs.launchpad.net/ipython/+bug/460359

-- Not using --author, but recording origin:
commit ffa96dbc431628218dec604d59bb80511af40751
Author: Fernando Perez <Fernando.Perez at berkeley.edu>
Date:   Sat Apr 24 20:35:08 2010 -0700

    Fix readline detection bug in OSX.

    Close https://bugs.launchpad.net/ipython/+bug/411599

    Thanks to a patch by Boyd Waters.


Ideally, when a significant new feature lands, we should immediately
summarize it in the whatsnew/ docs, but I know that is often hard to
do, as features continue to evolve or a while.  All the more reason
why commit messages with sufficient, accurate information are so
important.

Cheers,

f